Tag: transportation

An employment opportunity brought Matt Smith (above), a 30-year old business-development manager, to the Washington D.C. area from Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania in 2009. He chose to live in Arlington because of its urban feel and plethora of transportation options. “Arlington feels like D.C. to me, but it’s cleaner and greener,” said Smith, who works at goDCgo …

Transit would be better served if the pay-per-ride and unlimited fare schemes that currently dominate were expanded to include more fine-tuned pricing structures similar to those offered by cell phone companies. That was the idea that won the recent second annual Outside the Box transportation conference and competition at George Mason University’s (GMU’s) School of …

“Does a city speak?” This provocative question – posed by Saskia Sassen (pictured above) – opened the recent Mobilities in Cities: From Visible to Invisible conference at Columbia University. It’s hard to deny that a city has life, but does it live and communicate? Sassen has explored these ideas before: the juxtaposition of technology – ephemeral, artificial, …

More people are moving throughout Arlington County, Virginia without additional automobile congestion. Over the past 15 years, Arlington’s arterial roads have had less traffic, while transit usage during the same period of time has increased 34.5 percent. As transit service has grown, customer satisfaction has increased, especially on the county’s ART buses. These statistics were …

Congressman Earl Blumenauer began the two-day Innovation in Mobility Public Policy Summit in Washington D.C. calling for multimodal transportation systems. The Oregon Democrat described how transit, walking, and cycling are all necessary in order to “coax more capacity” out of our current transportation systems. And it seems, by the focus of speakers on a panel called “How Local Governments …

Arlington County Commuter Services (ACCS) looks and operates more like a start-up tech company than a government agency. The transportation demand management (TDM) arm of the Virginia county has an energy one might not normally expect in a government office. Busily decorated with site plan documents pinned to walls, bookcases filled with business management paperbacks, and …

We have been taught to hate sprawl in America, yet, in the past 10 years, our country has become, on average, slightly more sprawling than in the decade prior. That was one finding of Smart Growth America’s Measuring Sprawl 2014 report, released earlier this month. The study, conducted by University of Utah city planning professor Reid Ewing …

May 7 is Walk and Bike to School Day 2014 in Arlington, Virginia (and Bike to School Day nationally), but once a year isn’t the only time students can participate in these activities. Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is a national program designed to encourage walking and biking to school on a more regular basis, …

Parking isn’t something many people think about until it’s unavailable. Even city planners have historically considered parking somewhat of an afterthought. Cities are paying more attention to the resource lately, however, in part due to the influence of one book in particular: The High Cost of Free Parking, by UCLA professor and urban planner Donald …

I have written about Activity Centers before, to less than stellar Internet traffic. My concerns regarding how to market the regional planning initiative have been shared by my Mobility Lab colleague Paul Mackie, and we have struggled to come up with a hook or angle for these neighborhoods that will capture the imagination of the D.C. public. …